I’ve always wanted to do something like this, but haven’t gotten around to it.  Book spines, telling stories.  You don’t even need to open them!

(via Bookslut via TMN)

Filed under Things I Am Bad At: Judge a book by its cover.  The goal of this (simple, difficult) game is to guess the average number of stars under the book’s listing on Amazon.  You get a running tally of how many you guessed correctly.

A book’s journey from one language into another can be perilous. The Russian title for J. D. Salinger’s classic tale of adolescence translates as “Above the Precipice in the Rye.” A clerk in a Yokohama bookshop once told John Steinbeck’s wife that yes, he had a copy of Steinbeck’s “Angry Raisins.” Has this bumpy road gotten any smoother in recent years? Let the following quiz be your guide.

…

3. James Finn Garner dedicated his best seller “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories” to his wife, Lies (pronounced “lease”), which is the Dutch equivalent of Elizabeth. In the Norwegian edition, the book’s dedication reads:

a) “This book is dedicated to Untruths, for everything”
b) “For Dissembling, my everything”
c) “For Rental Unit, my north star”
d) “Lies Flat, I can’t live without you”

(via NYT: “Transloosely Literated,” by Henry Alford [6 Jul 2008])

The top 10 most discarded books in hotel rooms

1. The Blair Years by Alastair Campbell
2. Don’t You Know Who I Am? by Piers Morgan
3. A Whole New World by Jordan
4. Wicked by Jilly Cooper
5. Dr Who Creatures & Demons by Justin Richard
6. The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown
7. I Can Make You Thin by Paul McKenna
8. Humble Pie by Gordon Ramsay
9. The Story Of A Man And His Mouth by Chris Moyles
10. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling

(via Bookslut)

No child should touch a gun or pistol, or on any account present one at another person. We behold a little boy shooting his sister dead!

And:

Here we see the danger of playing with lighted candles. One little girl has set the bed-curtains on fire, and the other her hair; and both are in great danger of being burnt to death, unless someone grants them speedy assistance.

From The Book of Accidents (1831), with excellent woodcut illustrations.

(via Ectoplasmosis)

I’d always assumed the criteria were loose (at best), but I didn’t realize that the only necessary condition of stating that a movie is “Based On” the book is a cursory glance at the book’s cover and a $150 million budget.

No, really; that’s it.

And I know “the book” is traditionally supposed to be better than the movie — but Darwin’s On The Origin of the Species has more in common with AVPR than Will Smith’s (and Francis Lawrence’s, or whoever’s responsible) “I Am Legend” does with Matheson’s.

The result is so unrecognizable, and so irredeemably awful, that–well, there’s nothing to say. The only tension in the movie was the hope, the slightest glimmer of possibility, that the filmmakers were bright enough to use the book’s best elements in a good way, or even a bad way.

Instead, they didn’t use them at all. They used a name, and a title, and a scary thing in the darkness.